In the film days, the key technical idea was promoted by Ansel Adams in his famous phrase, "previsualization." By that, he meant primarily seeing the finished image in one's mind's eye and then calculating the exposure and necessary negative development before making the exposure. In our digital world, that pretty much is ancient history — with this kind of image as an exception.

Knowing I wanted the smallest hint of detail in the foreground and full detail in the moon required two separate exposures. Once I was back home, I then combined the two exposure in Photoshop, blending them to a seamless combination. Simple, but the result is much closer to the way our eye sees the scene rather than how a camera's sensor sees the scene.

One of the interesting parts of this process is the amount of movement the moon traverses inbetween exposures. In this combination image, I needed to move the moon down and left about a quarter inch in each direction to get it to line up with the white disc of the first exposure. With the Earth spinning so fast, why aren't we all dizzy all the time?